“Last Days” opens with a montage of media coverage of a Christian missionary named John Allen Chau. We quickly learn how his story ends. He was killed in 2018, at 26, while attempting to bring his faith to the people of the remote North Sentinel Island, in the Bay of Bengal, miles from India’s coast. One commentator in the audio portion of the montage is blunt: “He wasn’t a martyr, he was an idiot.”
The movie is a fictionalized account of Chau’s life, directed by Justin Lin, whose 2002 film “Better Luck Tomorrow” is a sensitive, pessimistic character study a group of Asian American teenagers. He went on to direct five pictures in the “Fast and Furious” franchise. His experience in two discrete modes of filmmaking serves him well here — with the help of a disciplined, insightful performance from Sky Yang as Chau. It’s a globe-trotting narrative that takes in landscapes both lush and foreboding.
The movie’s flashback structure gives us a thorough look at Chau as he transforms into a highly driven carrier of the gospel. He makes a conscious decision to put himself in danger. “You want to be that guy who goes to Mordor,” another missionary observes. After Chau journeys to the island and never returns, an Indian police inspector named Meera Ganali, played by Radhika Apte with steely commitment, investigates Chau’s disappearance as a missing persons case. She serves as an audience surrogate, and her exasperated empathy sounds the movie’s truest note. “Last Days” manages to be thoroughly disquieting without overtly judging its subject.
Last Days
Rated PG-13 for themes, language, violence. Running time: 2 hours. In theaters.
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